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This book investigates the down low—a phenomenon in which black men engage in sex with both men and women even though they do not identify as gay, queer, or bisexual—and its emergence in the early twenty-first century. It begins with a simple premise: down low might actually characterize black sexual representation, rather than be a reference to a group of black men’s sexual practices. Black sexuality then is figured within a “glass closet,” a space marked by hypervisibility and confinement, spectacle, and speculation. The book analyzes the inception of the down low and its contemporary modes of circulation in popular culture such as news, film, television, gossip blogs, and music, and how they reinforce troubling perceptions of black sexuality. It suggests that both in the psychology of reception and the politics of circulation, the down low reflects contemporary anxieties about the nature of citizenship, national values, and social norms. The book also examines how the down low intertwines blackness with queerness in the popular imagination.

As nineteenth-century secrets of the city morphed into twentieth-century settlement house autobiographies, realist tramping tales, and sensational Sapphic novels, so too have instances of queer slumming taken unexpected cultural turns in the U.S. imaginary during the twenty-first century. The corollary to this claim also holds true: by no means did slumming literature's obsession with sexual knowledge—or the desperate modes of queer slumming that countered this obsession—vanish once homosexual group identity crystallized across the American scene. If anything, slumming's mania is still too present, extending well beyond literatures into a host of media—lowbrow television talk shows, highbrow independent art films, and gay lifestyle magazine cartoons, to name but three—that contest and confirm persistent forms of spectacularization. This chapter explores some rhetorical echoes of earlier queer slumming literatures, focusing on discourses that inform slumming investigations of the down low.

This chapter presents an excerpt from Alec Wilder's 1972 book titled American Popular Song: The Great Innovators. This book is about the successful opening the musical Tip-Toes in December 1925, which was written by George and Ira Gershwin. Wilder compares the show to other musicals and suggestes that it had the most excellent opening number in the song The Certain Feeling and the most number of memorable hit songs including Looking for a Boy, Sweet and Low-Down, and Nice Baby!. He also describes the uniqueness of George's compositions.

This book has argued for the necessity of interpreting the down low—a phenomenon in which black men engage in sex with both men and women even though they do not identify as gay, queer, or bisexual—as a cultural narrative that illuminates the relationships between the misconceptions about AIDS and its transmission while also reflecting the ideological assumptions that undergird knowledge about black gender and sexuality. Reading the down low “symptomatically”—as an object in the production of knowledge on black sexuality—requires that one read the invisibility of down-low figures alongside the technologies of hypervisibility that reveal the glass closet. The down low exposes the false distinction between public and private, particularly in the case of blackness, and the anxious types of recuperation necessary to make racial cum sexual difference both legible and visually intelligible in national discourses raised under the pretense of public health. The down low might be a quintessential example of what John L. Jackson Jr. describes as “Racial Americana”.

This chapter examines a series of discursive events that produce a shared grammar for a national viewing public to accept the down low—a phenomenon in which black men engage in sex with both men and women even though they do not identify as gay, queer, or bisexual— as a compelling narrative to explain recent trends in HIV transmission. Taking up the concept of “psychogeographic proximity”—the possibility of existing in the same place at different times—it analyzes what temporalities, material conditions, and sets of relations give rise to narratives akin to the down low. Finding antecedents to the down low in visual logics exercised under slavery and in other discursive events of reconsolidation, the chapter argues that the down low was produced, in part, by certain pressures exerted under advanced capitalism and the disjointed and extremely ambivalent sensibilities that characterize representations of black sexuality as hypermasculine and sexually deviant such that articulating blackness and queerness together is a redundancy.

In this essay, Johnson, author of Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men in the South—An Oral History (2008), returns to that book’s source material to consider how his interviewees re-created a variety of southern loci—New Orleans, black colleges, golf courses and country clubs—in ways that facilitated homosexual identity formation while challenging established binaries between gay and straight, black and white, and work and play. Whereas Sweet Tea gives voice to the men’s lives without analysis, here Johnson critically engages some of the stories that exemplify the ways in which same-sex encounters involving black southern men also shed light on the history of black homosexuality in the South. The essay argues that black gay men are creating multiple Souths as sexual dissidents and gender non-conformists whose sexuality is shaped not only by the history of race in the region but also by the spaces their queer bodies create and consume.

This chapter investigates how white homonormative narratives perform tyrannous acts that distort understandings of queerness for people of color. As white queerness romanticizes and celebrates “coming out”—becoming the universal marker of liberation—these fascinations forge a space where other, discrete ways of being in the world appear anachronistic, backwards, or rare. McCune re-opens the case of “white men on the Down Low (DL),” if you will—to elucidate how the larger discourse of the queer triumphant, or queer progress, activates an erasure of all queers (white included) who do not fit the mold of the “out and proud” gay subject. This elision constructs a cultural amnesia around other ways of knowing sexuality outside of coming out—which enables a mis-remembering of a white queer past and present, devoid of discretion. Secondly, these constructions of a white queer past sanitize white queerness and enable a discourse that not only impacts how white queers perpetually privilege progress narratives, but potentially demonizes or distorts queers of color who perform often more illegible enactments of queerness. Bringing back the film Brokeback Mountain as a shape-shifting cultural text—globalizing an understanding of the foregone closet—the chapter forces an interracial non-romance between discretion in whiteface and blackface. Brokeback Mountain and other resonant texts perform a popular queer historiography, which misreads or under-reads the broader histories and social realities of queer people within and outside of the U.S.

This chapter examines how the glass closet and ignorance can function in tandem with one another in relation to the down low—a phenomenon in which black men engage in sex with both men and women even though they do not identify as gay, queer, or bisexual—by offering a close reading of R. Kelly’s episodic hip-hopera Trapped in the Closet. Infidelity, concealment, and the inextricability of blackness and queerness in the public imagination are foundational themes of Trapped in the Closet. Part of the hip-hopera’s appeal lies in its ability to visualize the interplay among and between many of the most persistent and compelling stereotypes of black masculinity, including the down-low brother and the hip-hop star, and to set them against the backdrop of a postindustrial black urban landscape. Thinking through the relationship between representations of black geopolitics and queer theory, this chapter explores Trapped in the Closet’s use of imagery and music to interrogate binaries such as black/white, knowledge/ignorance, urban/suburban, and homosexual/heterosexual that structure and maintain a “ghettocentric imagination” as well as a broader panoptical imaginary attracted and repulsed by black bodies.

This chapter focuses on the church, the veritable birthplace of the down low—a phenomenon in which black men engage in sex with both men and women even though they do not identify as gay, queer, or bisexual. More specifically, it examines the media scandal that surrounded the prominent Atlanta-area pastor Bishop Eddie Long and his out-of-court settlement with four young male plaintiffs on charges of sexual misconduct. It considers the down low as a signification practice that threatens the black church’s representational claim to moral legitimacy and authority. It also explores the syncretism of capitalist ideologies and Christian theology, the irrevocable blending of mind and body, and the intermixing of black sexual politics and black religious expression. It shows how the black church facilitates the down low’s rhetorical hold in popular culture, confirming for some what they already hold true about homosexuality: it is a sin that requires repentance, and a disease that requires a treatment or cure. Finally, it discusses the frequency with which homophobia and its inverse—homophilia—haunt and animate both black church and down-low rhetoric.

This chapter examines the relationship between race and sexuality in the entertainment industry and how speculations about aberrant sexuality cohere to a range of black bodies and genders. It expands traditional definitions of the down low—a phenomenon in which black men engage in sex with both men and women even though they do not identify as gay, queer, or bisexual—as well as its focus on black masculinity and secretive sexual practice to include a range of genders subject to homosexual or transsexual speculations. It also explicitly takes up the question of what is queer about black celebrity by analyzing gossip blogs such as Queerty.com, the Rodonline blog, Starpulse.com, and Bossip.com. It argues that we must understand how rumor and gossip articulate with modes of popular panopticism that regulate queer and black bodies through seemingly innocuous acts of consumption.

The author presents the “down low” as both a mainstream media construction and as described by E. Lynn Harris in his novel Invisible Life and argues that the secrecy and marginalization of African American men on the DL reveal the centrality of monogamy in definitions of both black respectability and homonormativity. The contrast between the mainstream media construction of TheBlack Man on the DL on the one hand and Harris’s personal account of secretly loving a man and a woman on the other sheds light on how dominant constructions of the DL not only perpetuate racism, heterosexism, and hegemonic notions of gender, but also mononormativity. The author demonstrates how narratives of The Black Man on the DL rely on compulsory monogamy to maintain race, gender, and sexual hierarchies and to displace anxieties about promiscuity and HIV transmission on to the bodies of young black men. In constrast, Invisible Life is a polyqueer narrative of the DL in that it offers a critique of compulsory monogamy and a vision of a world in which bisexual African American men would not have to choose to be either gay or straight.